Artists exploring technology, philosophy, and science

Part of Google Arts & Culture's ongoing artist residency programme, this collaboration with LAS Art Foundation commissioned new works by Xin Liu (nom nom) and Eunjo Lee (In Your Eyes, Before my Own). The LAS Online Art Residency supported the artist’s exploration of living systems and digital worldbuilding through utilising Google AI tools such as Gemini, Veo, Nano Banana, curatorial support and technical mentorship.

This artwork is a navigable world simulation driven by Neural Cellular Automata and a Gemini weather system that explores distributed intelligence and the continuous transformation of matter. The simulation regenerates every 24 hours for 30 days and concludes with a permanent digital record of the world's evolution.

Inspired by research into computational life by Google’s  by Blaise Agüera y Arcas,  and Alexander Mortvintsev.  Xin explores intelligence as an emergent phenomenon of matter. Google Gemini acts as an observer and weather system, responding to the world's changes and triggering storms and rain.

"What we call forests, cities, or selves may be temporary patterns emerging from smaller exchanges of matter and memory. I want to explore how intelligence is not concentrated in one monumental model, but distributed across millions of tiny neural networks." –Xin Liu 

Explore this 30-day simulation as it builds towards a permanent archive

This 20-minute video work explores human and non-human consciousness. Following the dream-like journey of a voice towards self-knowledge, the video moves through three worlds, each representing a different layer of consciousness.

Lee converted hand sketches into 3D assets via Nano Banana Pro and Veo, layered motion-captured choreography onto characters, and mapped Korean Hangul phonetics to create a linguistic system reflecting the landscape’s geometry, co-developed with Gemini. Lee calls this process ‘techno-alchemy'.

“This opened up a vast alchemical laboratory... As the ancient philosophy of Indra's Net (Buddhism) posits that all entities in the universe reflect one another... this concept is manifesting itself today through the structure of the Neural Network.”- Eunjo Lee

"I deeply hope that technology does not remain a mere tool for efficiency; rather, I wish it would evolve into a medium that restores the cosmic connectivity." – Eunjo Lee

Experience this 20-minute video work across three non-human cities.

Exhibition presented on las-art.foundation and Google Arts & Culture. Launched alongside an artists' talk moderated by Barbara Cueto at Sybil in Berlin.